How to turn off notifications on Android

It doesn’t take many apps before your phone starts bombarding you with notifications.

Add your Facebook and Twitter account details, add an email address or two, plus install virtually any news, social or fitness app and pretty soon you’ll be getting a constant stream of bleeps from the device in your pocket.

Notifications are useful, of course, but once you start getting too many of them you’ll start to ignore them, and that’s when you miss the important ones.

So, whether you have a Galaxy S4, an HTC One, an LG G3 or any other Android device, here’s how you can turn them off.

Disable notifications

If you don’t want to receive any notifications from a particular app—such as a game, for example—there’s an easy way to turn them off entirely. Go to Settings > Apps > All and scroll down to the app you want.

Tap the app then untick the box labelled Show notifications. You now won’t see any from this app. Job done!

Take control of notifications

If you don’t want to shut notifications off completely for a particular app, you can control them in a more refined way.

Change the alarm

One method is to change the notification alarm for your most important apps. All apps will use your default notification tone, so if you change it for the apps whose notifications you want to check you should change the tone for that app.

You’ll then be able to tell the difference between your important apps and the rest while your phone is still in your pocket. You do this through different methods in each app.

In Gmail, for example, hit the menu button then choose Labelsettings, followed by Sound. Here you can assign a different sound to a specific mail label—all your other mail notifications will continue to use your default alert.

Silence notifications

Most apps will also give you the option to decide what events you will be notified of. Again, this is different for each app, but usually be found in the Notifications section of the app’s Settings screen.